The Ghosts of White Friars
by gibbsheroic27
Summary: Jack. It's what his mother used to call him. He hadn't heard the name in years. He had been James for the better part of half his life, and had expected to remain that way for the last woeful dregs of it. He'd expected to die as James. Had been resigned to it. At peace even, in whatever small measure of such things could ever be found in these dismal walls. A Jack Devereaux story.
1. The meaning in a smile

AN Based on the Foyle's War episode The Hide.

So this is what it felt like to be saved.

Jack cannot get the odd thought out of his head, even long after Mr. Foyle's footsteps have echoed into silence in the metallic halls of his self-imposed prison.

A prison that man had just moved heaven and hell, or perhaps even more impressively, Sir Charles, to rescue Jack from.

Jack. His hands twisting over and over, the young man paced an awkward two steps to the far cell wall, his thoughts a jumble. Jack

It has been a long time since he had even thought of himself as Jack. Never mind being addressed as such.

 _I knew her._ Jack. It was what his mother used to call him. He hadn't heard the name in years, even Agnes only used it as a code, a message between them. Never as a proper name. He had been James for the better part of half his life, and had expected to remain that way for the last woeful dregs of it.

A smile, more warm and profound than any his fath-Sir Charles had ever deigned to bestow on him, the slightest of nods, the deepest of hidden meanings, known of which he quite knew what to make of yet, nor indeed what to do about.

 _I'll be away for a while, but when I get back…_

He was coming back. People generally didn't, in Jack's experience. But there was just something about Christopher Foyle, something…

He had expected to die as James. Had been resigned to it. At peace even, in whatever small measure of such things could ever be found in these dismal walls.

Living as Jack, however…well, that was another matter entirely.

And it was one he wasn't any more sure what to do with than that layered smile.

 _I was very sorry…to hear that she died._ Nobody had ever said that to him either, somehow. Not even Mrs. Ramsey, their old housekeeper. Not even his stepmother, for all her well-meaning fumbles in those later years.

He would have thought it years too late to make a difference now, but the words had been strangely cathartic.

The jingling of the guards' keys, accompanied by the tell-tale tap-step of Mr. Deacon's gait drew Jack's attention back to the present, and he spared one last glance to the long-vanished spectre of his savior.

"Thank you Sir." James Deveraux had died in Dresden.

Jack however. Well, it appeared that Jack was just getting started.

00

Deacon gazed resolutely at the guard before him, his eye unwavering, his expression implacable. After four years as an officer, after being maimed and living to tell the tale, after losing friends to enemy bullets, and a fiancé to society's prejudices, after more than a decade as a lawyer, after two decades with a card-shark for a father, Frederick Deacon's poker face was impeccable.

The guard made a show of inspecting the paperwork again, and Deacon squared his shoulders. "You will release Mr. Devereaux into my custody Sir. Immediately." It was a tone he had sworn to leave in the North African dessert, along with most of his right foot and a good portion of his face. But desperate times called for desperate measures, and these were indeed desperate times.

The guard remained stubbornly unswayed. "The prisoner's scheduled for execution tomorrow. I would have thought no amount of fancy lawyering would spare traitors their due _Sir_." The attitude in that sentence practically walked away by itself, and Deacon felt himself bristle, poker face be damned.

He would bet a great deal that the man in front of him had never served. That he didn't understand, not the way Deacon did.

Not the way, apparently, James Devereux did. Frederick has seen a lot of tragedy in this war, on the battlefield and off it, but the tale Mr. Foyle had laid before him scant hours ago, the evidence he had presented. Well, heartbreaking did not quite cover it, now did it.

Deacon let some of his anger leak into his voice. "As you can see, the judge has commuted his sentence, pending new evidence which utterly exonerates _Major_ Deveraux of any wrong doing or treasonous action." He emphasized the rank, though he knew it would prove little help.

The guard began reading the paperwork for the third time.

Deacon gave up patience, and resorted to the fare of lesser men: belligerence.

"Regardless of your opinion on the matter, if you do not permit me to see my client right this moment, you will not only be in direct contravention of a judge's explicit writ, you will also be violating the War Measures Act for humane treatment of imprisoned personnel."

It was a long shot, and roughly as legally sound as a vegetable sieve, but in this instance, reverse psychology worked beautifully.

Keys jangled musically from meaty hands. "Fine, be my guest, if you're so insistent. But just remember most good men are nothing like that traitorous scum."

Deacon deliberately slapped his cane against the guard's shin with an utterly juvenile but supremely satisfying crack. "Oh, forgive me, how clumsy of me."

Snatching the crumpled release order from the guard's lax fingers, he rested a hand on the freshly unlocked door, tossing his parting shot over his shoulder in a purely perfunctory manner. "If you would be so kind as to fetch your superior for me, I will see this matter sorted at once. Thank you."

Dismissal complete, Deacon set his feet as firmly as he could on the floor and pulled the door open with a groan.

The sight which greeted him was both better and worse than he had anticipated.

James Devereaux's clothes were clean, his cell immaculate. Perhaps a little too immaculate Deacon acknowledged, grimacing slightly at the edges of a bruise just visible along the major's hairline.

"Mr. Deacon?" James' voice was as soft as it ever was, although there was a quality to it, a life, that had been starkly absent before.

But it was the startlement in that tone that caused Deacon's eye to sting, his head to duck and his chest to clench painfully. The wonder. The surprise.

Frederick Deacon has always prided himself on being a man of fairness, a man of unbiased opinion and impeccable judgement. A man who gave every client he had ever served a fair hearing, who did not judge, did not turn a blind eye, did not hate.

Everyone lost something in this war, but that belief, that sense of justice and honour, the loss of that bothered Deacon far more than even the loss of his eye.

Frederick Deacon knew he had failed James Deveraux, in every sense of the word.

But standing in that cell doorway, meeting the tired, pained, over bright eyes of a man he nearly condemned to hang at the woefully young age of twenty-seven out of sheer apathy and misplaced hatred, Frederick Deacon feels the first stirring of something deep within his chest. Something he could have sworn he left out there in the North African sand, along with the corpses of his men.

Something not unlike the determination to do better. Something not unlike the desire to finally, truly, begin to move on. Begin to help others again. Begin to heal.

Begin to live.

Fred Deacon took a hesitant half-step into the cell, his hand raising almost of his own accord.

"Jame-"

"Jack," the voice was still soft, but the eyes were firm, the shoulders for once unhunched, if not exactly unburdened. "It's Jack, if you'd be so kind." Somehow, that sounded more pleading than imperious. Deacon felt his heart crack just a little.

He had a feeling that would become a frequent occurrence, around this man.

"Jack then." Deacon hesitated a moment, reading the slight wariness that remained in the man's shoulders. Really, considering the situation even that was nothing short of a miracle, but perhaps- "Mr. Foyle came to see me, before he left for America, and, well… I was wondering if you would be interested in getting out of here?" He squared his shoulders on the last, his voice growing more confident as the words poured forth.

This was at least partially an involuntary response to the marked change in Jam-Jack's expression, as if a long suffered storm of clouds was clearing before his very eyes. Sure enough, the mention of Mr. Foyle's name leeched the last of the tension from the young man's shoulders, his face open and hopeful in a way that Deacon had never thought to see in such a morose and controlled lad.

Jack edged a step forward, uncertain for the first time. "Do…do you know when he'll return? Mr. Foyle that is? From America?" He forms the sentences like he's testing out the reality of them, as if he expects the facts to distort and seep away before his eyes.

Fred isn't sure why, or how, but it's one of the saddest things he's ever seen.

"Well, I'm not sure of the details," eager shoulders began to slump, "but I could certainly look into it…presuming you do not object to me continuing to act as your counsel?" He followed this up by offering a hesitant hand, palm open and almost beckoning. They were running out of time before the guard returned with a whole new battle field of arguments and blustering.

A slender hand, scrapped knuckles, cracked nails, bruised fingers, reached out to grasp his in a firm shake. "I would like that Mr. Deacon." And wonder of wonders, there was a hesitant smile. "Thank you."

Deacon gazed at their surroundings, considered the open door and the no doubt rapid approach of the warden.

"You're most welcome." He eyed the bruise curling across Jack's temple. Oh, protocol be damned. This whole place could choke on it for all he cared. "And my friends call me Fred."

Most of the ones who had were now buried on another continent, but the point stood.

A slightly more genuine smile, a firm pump of his hand. "It's very nice to meet you Fred."

Deacon had just enough time to blink twice at that, because something about that polite tone, the set of the jaw, the courtesy and sincerity, if he didn't know better he would almost be prepared to swear-

The warden clattered in, the guard a hovering menace behind him, and Deacon, shaken from his momentary pause, gave Jack's newly tensed hand a reassuring final squeeze, and tucked his speculations away for a better time and place, before turning around and preparing to do battle.

As he has learned, better than most, there is more than one way to fight a war.

And, he realizes that day, there is also more than one way to win one.

And this, this right here? This felt an awful lot like winning.

00

Christopher Foyle hesitates on the gang-way of the ship, his coat catching in the wind, his eyes searching the dock for he knows not quite what.

For a long moment, time stands still, as his eyes sweep the faces of well-wishers for a glimpse of someone who could not possibly be there.

The steamer's whistle blows shrilly, the Steward moving towards Foyle purposefully. Time to go.

Yet Christopher hesitates a moment more, his gaze distant and thoughtful. He shouldn't leave, not now. There is suddenly so much here for him, so much he needs to do. So much time lost. So much still to be gained.

 _Wars don't last forever. Maybe a year, maybe ten, but I'll still be here. Waiting._

"Time to board Sir." The Steward's tone is rather direct, and quite right too. He's holding up the entire boat. Foyle grimaces ruefully, his feet moving inexorably forward.

"Sorry about that. Something I left behind."

Foyle raised Andrew to always finish what he started. To be a man of his word. To be a man of honour. He never got a chance to raise-

His fist clenching tightly on the handle of his suitcase, Christopher cuts off that thought. There is nothing to be gained from it now. For anyone.

He makes his way down the rail of the ship with steps heavy but once again resolute. He will keep to his course. He will see this through.

But he still stands against the rail and gazes behind them until the coast dwindles on the horizon and disappears into the setting sun.

He may be leaving, at the worst possible time. But he accomplished what he set out to do. He saved Caroline's son. And he is coming back, just as soon as his business in America is concluded. To offer whatever assistance he can to-

Christopher takes a deep breath, squeezes his moist eyes shut, and releases it into the fading light. To Jack.

He casts a last look at the fading coastline, and turns from the rail at long last, a final promise stealing from his lips. "It will be my honour…Jack."

He is coming back. Just as soon as he can.


	2. What we lost

_Dear Sir,_

 _I trust you have arrived safely and that your business is proceeding-_

Jack snatched up the leaf of paper, crunching the scribbles tightly within his fist, his heart hammering in his chest, his ears straining for the clank and thump of the guards.

Pring! The ring of a typewriter slamming back wrenched him forcefully back into the present.

Jack gazed at a set of dusty window blinds, late summer sun filtering through the slats to hit his skin.

Right, this was a law firm, not a prison cell. Hard to tell given the décor, granted, but still a world away from where he'd expected to live out the last few sorry weeks of his life.

He jerked his head back involuntarily, his face blanking, his eyes darting to and fro, in case law clerks or secretaries had the same sixth sense for any resurgence of sarcasm or personality or _defiance_ as prison guards. At least they wouldn't have batons he reflected ruefully, more aware than ever of the sharp ache ghosting through his rib cage with each in drawn breadth, the paper scrunched in his hand crunching loudly in the echoing space, even over the snap and stab of metal keys and the calls of busy voices.

"Jack?" A cracked teacup appeared in his line of vision. Jack stared at the faded purple violet bursts that wrapped around the chipped handle for a moment longer than he suspected was normal. He suspected. He couldn't be sure.

It had been a very long time since anyone had thought to offer him a cup of tea.

Some of that must have shown in his eyes, as Deacon's face twitched with something that might have been sympathy. "No milk I'm afraid, but the leaves steep well enough."

Jack clenched a hand against his leg, reaching up to accept the saucer in a shaking grip, pain lancing across his chest in protest to the stretch.

They both watched the china shudder alarmingly for a moment, then Jack swallowed the knot in his throat enough to choke out a sincere "Thank you…Fred." He stumbles on the last, but he gets it out there. He doesn't mention that milk and sugar have been precious commodities for enough of his life that he never really learned to take tea any other way except straight black, luke warm if he's very lucky.

He does not mention how long it has been since anyone showed him this sort of simple courtesy.

This sort of humane kindness.

A pair of focused blue eyes, crinkling at the edges with deliberate understanding flashed through his head for a moment, knocking the breath out of his lungs for the umpteenth time since Christopher Foyle strode into his life, and then out again as swiftly as he had come.

 _I knew her._

Jack closed his eyes for a moment, holding onto the memory of those eyes, that gaze, the focus. Allowing himself to feel the warmth of it again, if only for but a moment.

00

The boy looked as if a stiff breeze would knock him clean into next week. The thought was an out of place one, Fred would admit, but not precisely an inappropriate one, considering the flash of open vulnerability that just skittered across Jack's pale face.

And when, he wondered, had he gotten so old as to automatically refer to a man scarcely a score of years his junior as a boy.

His mother, Fred reflected ruefully, would have taken one look at that expression and declared Jack Devereaux innocent in three seconds flat, before promptly inviting him in for tea fortified with brandy, served on their "cosy" tea set, the one with the crack in one rim from Fred and Evelyn's make believe days.

Deacon dropped his head with a sigh, before firmly shaking the memories from his head. It did no good to dwell on it. That tea set was as long gone as its owners, atomized by a doodle bug while Fred was unconscious on a hospital ship in the North Atlantic, blissfully unaware of the moment he became the last surviving member of the Deacon family.

He flinched involuntarily, startled at the edge of unexpected sweetness following the old, familiar bitterness of the memory. Distantly, he felt a hesitant hand brush his arm.

"F-Fred. Are you alright?" Polite, so very, very polite as to be brittle enough to shatter any moment. That was what had struck him, the moment that mask first cracked, wide brown eyes regarding him with something he hadn't allowed himself to dwell on at the time. Something desperate and wild and terrified. Something innocent.

And looking back, that had been the moment when it had all begun to fall down, his conviction that this man was guilty, meddling retired police officers be damned. Those eyes. Not Mr. Foyle's conviction, or the conflicting evidence, or Jack's own withdrawn behaviour.

Not even his mother's voice, echoing and re-echoing around his head the moment he first clapped eyes on James Devereaux in a prison interrogation cell, face pale and drawn, eyes blank of emotion, with folded hands and a whispered "thank you" on his lips as Deacon left. The only words he had uttered over all their interactions, until Foyle had swept into the affair like an avenging avalanche, or a sword of justice in a trench coat and slightly out of date trilby.

Fred had served with a lot of old money at the start of the war, spent enough time at prep school to recognize upper class manners, the inbred kind that were more rote memory and appearances than anything, sincerity never entering the picture at all.

Enough to know that this young man was as sincere as those school boys and soldiers were false and condescending. It had made little sense at the time, but Fred was an eye and a sister and half a dozen toes past bothering to care.

And then that question, "Is my father there?" and those eyes, wide and scared and so damn young that for the first time, Fred was forced to look away. To look away from a boy they were about to condemn to hang.

A boy who just wanted his father. Or, so he had forced himself to assume, even as every instinct-and an unfortunate introduction to the man in question-was screaming at him that nobody would ever _request_ the presence of Sir Charles, about to be condemned to death or not.

"Mr. Deacon. Do you need medical attention, sir?" And that snapped Deacon right out of self-recriminating ruminations, because that tone? That was authority incarnate. That was command, sure and earned and innate all at the same time.

And suddenly, imagining this lad as a distinguished officer turned spy was not the least bit difficult.

When his shoulders weren't curled into a semi-permanent slump, Jack Devereaux was…well, still not a tall man, but commanding nonetheless.

And Deacon was clearly not the only person to think so, if his secretary's attentive presence at their elbows was anything to go by, two of her junior colleagues approaching bearing fresh cups of tea-and were those smelling salts?-with brisk efficiency underlaid with urgency.

Exactly how long had he been unresponsive for? His colleague from three offices over, the one who always left early and never bothered to fetch his own coffee when there was anyone else remotely close enough to plausibly do the fetching for him, chose that moment to burst onto the scene, face red and sweaty, first aid kit clutched in his hands. "Here it is sir!"

 _Sir?_ Jack appeared completely unphased by this astounding turn of events, snagging the kit with one hand, smoothly alleviating one of the junior secretaries-Brandy?- of the tea, and herding Fred towards his office in the same motion. He flashed a gentle smile at the room, "Thank you everyone. Miss Hawthorne, Brenda, Gladys, Mr. Topper, the help is much appreciated." Fred, the tea, the kit and Jack somehow now safely in said office, Jack leveled a calm "I'm sure Mr. Deacon will be quite recovered soon. We'll call if we need any more assistance," out the door before promptly shutting it in everyone's startled faces.

Fred leaned against his desk, blinking his good eyelid rapidly. There…were many potential next questions here. What exactly had happened? What was the first aid kit for? How precisely had a man who was, as of two days ago, the most notorious convicted treason case in modern British history, who was _technically still a condemned man_ , manage to motivate an entire _legal office_ 's staff into prompt action with merely a commanding tone and a mild smile.

So, naturally, what he actually says is this: "That is the quickest I have ever seen Topper move. We couldn't even get him to budge for the air raid last year." _Air raid_. Words he had not been able to say with a clear voice and dry eyes since 43'.

Jack leaned heavily against the back of the shut door, the familiar slump working its way back into his frame, his eyes carefully averted. A half-smile, weaker and yet more genuine that the one he had flashed moments before, worked its way across his expression. In his hands, the previously rock steady teacup rattled alarmingly.

"I may have suggested you saw a rat," a quiet shrug, tea lapping at the edges of cheap china, "I thought you might want some quiet for a bit." Because of the flashback. He didn't say that, neither did Jack. Nobody in polite society talked about such things, even when half the world was going mad over the sufferings of the other half. They were still British gentlemen after all.

Fred mentally snorted. Uncle Archibald had been one of the less missed members of his obliterated family. But there was something in those eyes, something young and vulnerable and tentative, something that stopped him from asking any more questions.

Except the crucial one. "A rat? Why the medical kit then?" Surprise flitted across his companion's face, so quick that even less than five feet apart, he would have missed it completely if he had been concentrating even slightly less.

Damn this man must have made a good spy.

Gentle amusement was back, as was that quirked half smile, and why was that so familiar, that expression? He knew he'd seen it before, somewhere, recently…

"Brenda asked if it had bit you. The rat. I…played along. It seemed expedient." That was one of the longest sentences he'd ever heard the man utter, and he somehow maintained a straight face throughout.

Fred mentally reminded himself to never play poker Jack. And possibly reorganize the support staff's duties. Or arrange for retraining. Or buy rat traps. Not necessarily all in that order.

Since they obviously weren't going to talk about anything significant for the foreseeable future, Deacon carefully limped around to his desk chair, side eyeing Jack's continued presence against his door. "You can sit down if you like. I doubt my secretary, model of efficiency that she is, has immediate plans to batter the door down with a waste basket."

Jack blinked slowly, then moved with equal slowness to the aforementioned chair. He placed the probably now stone cold cup of tea on the desk between them. Fred failed utterly in restraining his curiousity. "Why the tea?" He did not add the somewhat snide suggestion of, "To throw at the rats perhaps?" Mentally reviewing the earlier scene, those smelling salts had perhaps actually been part of the office's cleaning supplies. And if Gladys thought throwing Lysol at rats-or, more alarmingly, possibly also those bitten by said rats- would be helpful, then maybe that suggestion wasn't as absurdly far-fetched as it should be.

Definitely ordering that extra training.

Jack quirked yet another smile. Deacon wondered briefly if they had entered an alternate dimension when Christopher Foyle first walked into this very office. The man seemed to have almost super-human powers to fix the apparently unfixable.

Either that, or young Mr. Devereaux was the most resilient individual it has ever been his privilege to meet.

Almost as if to prove his point, a rock steady hand reached out and grasped the handle of the teacup, perfectly balanced and regal looking, sipping at the no doubt stone cold liquid with casual aplomb, before murmuring into the rim of the cup, "Well, we are British after all."

And if he thought about the implications of that too much. If Fred allowed himself to think of Dresden, or bombs dropping on restaurants, or doodle bugs falling into town houses, or even dratted old Uncle Archibald in his attic room, he suspected he would start crying, appearances be damned.

Thus, lacking a viable alternative, instead, he chose to laugh. Choose to watch that quirked smile broaden into a sardonic grin, tinged with sadness yes, the laugh broken and hiccupping and stilted, but still a laugh.

And if, as Miss Hawthorne begins banging on the door with her waste basket in alarm, as they both dissolve into their chairs, if moisture falls from Jack's eyes, if it slides down his cheeks and drips onto his collar, until his laughter has dissolved fully into tears, well, the door has a strong lock. And Fred has never been a conventional employer, nor an easy one.

Miss Hawthorne would forgive him this.

And if some battered varnish and frazzled staff are all it takes to give one wounded soul a moment of peace, freely given from another wounded soul, well, it was a very small price to pay.

And maybe, when it came time to rise for the next day, Deacon will, for the first time in a very long time, feel that the effort was worth more than just going through the motions.

And maybe Mr. Foyle is not the only person with supernatural powers about, because in the space of less than a day, this old soul somehow holding together while falling apart in his uncomfortable desk chairs, has somehow reminded him something he thought he left in a North African desert, in the rubble of a London rowhouse, with a discarded ring on a hospital bedtable.

That life was somehow, someway, somewhen, still worth living.

00

 _Dear_ _Mr. Foyle,_ _Sir, It is my hope that this letter will not appear to you as being written out of turn, or as an attempt to place any obligation or expectation upon you._

Deacon's secretary cleared her throat carefully, her expression guarded. Jack focused on the paper at his knee for a moment longer, schooling his expression into detached friendliness. _Don't make them notice you. Don't appear to be anything special. Don't be noticed._

"My apologies for the door Miss Hawthorne." Sure enough, a thaw bloomed across her face. "Ach, that's alright Major. Mr. Deacon can be a might strange one at times. But a better man of the law you're never likely to see."

Just going by appearances, from her neat as a pin dress sense and impeccable efficiency of movement, Jack had somehow not expected the broad Scots that broadcast with admirable volume from Miss. Hawthorne's severe frame.

Then again, he had hardly been much in company of late. Jack grimaced ruefully at himself, careful to keep the expression clear of his face.

That was an understatement, if he ever thought of one. Even in the camps, the likes of Stanford were regrettably the only chaps remotely on the talkative side.

Jack stopped, even his breath freezing in his lungs for a moment. _It's a tragedy you haven't been able to see the consequences_. Oh Agnes.

Wonderful, fearless Agnes, who had understood without words why stepping out with her within a thousand miles of his fath-of Sir Charles' watchful eyes was quite out of the question, for either of their sakes. Agnes, who had pledged herself to him anyway, once they were finished school, once he attained top honours at Oxford, once the war was over.

Once they could leave England, and Sir Charles, far, far behind them.

Agnes, who hadn't hesitated when he'd snuck into her dorm at college in the wee hours of the morning and asked her to help him spy for their country. To help him fight a war.

Agnes, who had, in the end, made that final sacrifice for God and Country, that sacrifice both so often thought the so-called fairer sex was incapable of even comprehending.

"Major Devereaux? Do you need anything? More tea perhaps?" Tea was apparently as much a cure all in Edinburgh as it was in London, Jack reflected ruefully, attempting to gain some colour back into his face so as not to further alarm the attentive woman hovering at his elbow.

"I'm quite alright, thank you Miss Hawthorne," Jack flashed her a fleeting smile, his eyes darting back down to regard the worn floor boards a moment later. _Don't let them notice you_.

"Is Mr. Deacon ready for me then?" Miss Hawthorne drew her professional mask back in place with admirable efficiency, a brisk nod centering her thoughts in but a moment. Jack had a feeling she would be a credit to Special Branch, if she was ever so inclined.

"What do you know, Major, but did I not come to inform you that Mr. Deacon is waiting for you downstairs." Jack blinked. This place had stairs?

Admittedly, the trip from his cell to Deacon's outer office had been a blurred one at best, the sweet biscuits Miss Hawthorne had provided for them as soon as Fred had deemed it safe to unlock his door once more being the first remotely solid food in quite some time that had remained within his stomach long enough to begin digestion.

In fact, he hadn't even spared a thought to where such a delicacy must have come from. Observing the woman before him, the answer, he suspected, involved far more careful rationing and saving, sacrificed without a thought in the face of fellow creatures in need, than it did anything remotely black market.

That certainty helped the biscuits settle more gently in his stomach now.

It might be a trivial matter in the grand scheme of things, but upholding the law had been a cherished concept to Jack for most of his life, washed into his skin with his mother's blood and tears.

And now held there by Christopher Foyle's implacable certainty that justice was something worth fighting for, whatever the battlefield.

Jack allowed himself another glancing smile. "I seem to be in need of directions then, Miss Hawthorne, if it wouldn't be too much trouble?"

As he followed the secretary from the room, Jack carefully folded the half-scribbled sheets of paper clasped in his hands, stowing them securely into his pocket.

There would be time enough to finish it later. There would be time enough for many things, now. _And when I get back…_

Yes, there would time for a great many things indeed.

00

Downstairs evidently meant three flights of stairs, not one. It also apparently meant exiting out the back steps into a small plot of dusty earth beside the bins. Jack slouched down the stairs, only to stop rather abruptly and stare.

A large monkey puzzle tree spanned the entire plot of earth.

 _Araucaria Araucana_. His mother's words whispered softly in the back of his mind. It wasn't a memory. Sir Charles had always been far too concerned with proper appearances to have such an archaic monstrosity anywhere about his lands.

But Jack spent large swaths of his youth memorizing every Latin name for every bit of flora and fauna he was ever likely to come across, just to replay each syllable back in his head, just as he remembered his mother saying such things when he was a boy.

"I planted it." Deacon's voice caught Jack by surprise, his pulse jumping in time with his flinch. There was a time when he would have said with perfect confidence that nothing and no one could startle him anymore. Not after life at White Friars.

Not after Sir Charles.

His trainers back at the start of the war had never ceased to marvel at his ability to be utterly unflappable. At the time, Jack had shrugged philosophically and kept the bitter thought that at least his father had taught him _something_ that could be useful to the war effort to himself.

Now, having met who he's met and suspecting what he suspects he already knows in his heart, well…

There were many things about his childhood he regretted. Now it appeared there would just be one more. Or less.

Whether that gave events more meaning, or less, he had yet to decide. He wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer.

 _It wasn't an accident._ Alright, perhaps he already had his answer.

Jack blinked at Fred Deacon, the man's walking stick making a distinctive tapping on the pavement. There went the stealth theory. He supposed that just left this as one more thing the war had taken from him, along with his sanity and freedom, twice over, almost.

Along with Agnes. Jack swallowed, "It just struck me as…" Fred smiled wryly. "As out of place? Yes, it is rather, isn't it." They both gazed at the spiny branches scraping the edges of the building's drain pipe, the sky a faint patch of colour, far out of reach of the tree's top.

"But my sister, Evie," his voice hesitated for but a moment, Jack's gaze keen on Deacon's downturned face, his eyes catching the slight scuff of the cane in the dirt at their feet, "Well, our mother was dreadfully fond of the damn things, kept a good half dozen in the back garden, for all that it was scarcely bigger than this," he gestured expansively around the miniscule plot of dirt that backed the repurposed rowhouse his office occupied.

"Evie despised the things as much as I did, said they were ugly as sin." A smile ghosted across Fred's face, pulling at the scars around his eyepatch. "But after…" a gruff though clear voice that had Jack wincing at what he knew must be coming next. It was a woefully common story these days, "after the bomb, pretty much all that was left of the house was this little sapling."

A hand brushed the nearest spiked branch with unmistakable fondness, "And, well, Evie always said we lawyers were a spiky lot. So you see, I like to think she would have liked it, my planting it here."

Jack waited out the following beat, his face impassive, his hands balled into fists in his pockets. If his inability to be phased by the strangest and most unexpected turns of events was his greatest asset in the service, his expressive face had always been equally his greatest weakness.

"Well, that and I live in a second floor walk up, so…" Jack watched Fred's face carefully as he let his expression brighten into a helpless grin, waited until the man's mouth brightened in answer before allowing the first strains of a chuckle to leave his lungs.

And when they collapsed into helpless giggles, the spines of the tree turned out to be strangely soft as they broke their fall.

00

"Do you ever think we all forgot how to be human, somewhere along the way, in the course of this war?" Jack drew in a puff of nicotine, his cigarette cheap and acrid on his lips. His hand shook alarmingly with each pull.

Beside him, hunched companionably on the back steps, Fred seemed to give the rather pedestrian question some serious thought.

Miss Hawthorne had found them both giggling like breathless schoolboys, backs against a swath of low hanging tree limbs, spikes digging into their shirts with enough force to rip, but not enough to draw blood from the skin beneath.

The look she gave them, nine parts sympathetic understanding and zero parts disapproving made Jack wonder what she had lost in the war. Whom she had lost.

The deft way she slipped Fred precisely two utterly pristine cigarettes, one unbent match pressed carefully between them, without once breaking her mask of complete efficiency merely served to confirm his suspicions about how valuable she would be to Special Branch, if she ever suffered to leave Mr. Deacon's employ.

Judging by the distinctly concerned glance she shot over her shoulder as she retreated with a long suffering, "I dare say Mr. Topper will be asking after his afternoon cup just about now," her heather blue eyes holding the ghost of a twinkle in them, Jack would safely wager the probability of that to be rather low, Mr. Topper and his afternoon tea not withstanding.

Jack blew out a breath and slanted an eye at Fred through the haze of fresh smoke. Were you supposed to make friends with your legal council after being on trial for treason?

But then, was one supposed to find one's true father while on trial for treason.

Jack choked on an exhale, acrid smoke burning his throat and making the moisture gathered at the corners of his eyes threaten to finally fall once more.

Fred stubbed out his own, barely touched cigarette with a slightly apologetic, "My mother couldn't stand the smell of such things," his eyes following the hunch of Jack's shoulders with unmistakable concern.

"Are you all right?" Jack crumbled his own no doubt off brand and highly sought after cigarette in his hand, the glowing end burning into his fingers with a delightfully distracting heat.

He smiled faintly through the pain, "Why did you come to get me out of there?" Deacon didn't so much as blink at the abrupt change in conversation, his remaining eye sharp and clearly wise to the maneuver. Jack sighed silently. Perhaps he really had lost his touch for such "spy games," as his first regimental commander had scoffingly referred to it, six years of war and a lifetime ago, before codes and ciphers and badly addressed letters and radar and pilots operating half fueled bombers through English fog.

"Didn't Mr. Foyle tell you?" Jack's head shot up to regard Deacon, half balancing on his cane as he hauled himself up the back stairs. Then again, perhaps one didn't need more than a single eye to see more keenly that most chaps ever could or would care to try to.

"About Stanford? Yes, but I rather thought that…" Jack let that hang in the air about them, even as the first rays of afternoon sunlight finally broke through the spiky branches above their head.

Fred sighed, "You thought that I'd leave an innocent man in prison when another had admitted to committing the crimes of which he had been condemned, and more besides?" Jack kept his gaze cool and direct, unflinching. Sir Charles had hated it when he flinched.

Like much of the rest of the world, he saw it as a sign of weakness in character.

Deacon met his gaze for a long moment, and to his credit, he kept holding that gaze, even as words flowed forth as if from a long buried spring. "The first day I arrived at my unit in North Africa, I found a missive on my desk informing me that three men had been charged with cowardice. Attempted desertion. The regimental commander wanted to have them shot on sight. Said they didn't have the stomach for war, and therefore had no right to their miserable lives."

Deacon scuffed his bad foot on the ground for a moment, his expression distant. "Of my entire unit, only myself and those three men are still among the living. They were dishonourably discharged, still serving time in prison for desertion."

Fred drew his focus back to his companion. "I sometimes think they were the smartest out of all of us."

Deacon hauled himself up the last step, his eyes shadowed by the massive tree behind him. "I have yet to meet someone living today who doesn't regret something about this war." Jack recognized the words for what they were. The closest to an apology Fred was able to come.

Considering the situation had been as much of his own making as anyone else's, Jack did not think any form of apology was warranted.

One didn't have to apologize for failing to live up to the likes of Jack Harkoway in their pursuit of truth and justice, as Christopher Foyle had done in his quest to save Caroline Devereaux's son.

He felt his expression crack for a moment, and covered it with a deliberate step forward, one hand held out firmly before him. "Thank you, Fred." Sometimes, Jack supposed, apologies were as much for the giver as they were for the receiver.

And as a steady hand clasped his own in a firm grip, Jack cast a last glance at the tree forever searching for the sky behind them, yet never quite reaching it.

They all had things they regretted from this war. After all, wasn't that part of what it meant to be human?

00

There turned out to be a lot of paperwork involved in completing a stay of execution, never mind actually commuting such a sentence, and by the time the afternoon sun was slanting low through his office windows, Deacon was more than willing to admit defeat for the day.

He regarded the man sitting on the chair across from his desk, head bent low over some form or other, eyes forcefully alert, pulse no doubt jumping in his neck. "Well, perhaps we should call it a day? There's nothing here that can't be taken care of later, once we've both had a chance to get some rest." Jack's shoulders most certainly did not slump in relief at that suggestion, but his quiet smile spoke louder than words.

Perhaps it was the angle, or the light, or fatigue setting in, but something struck Deacon about that smile, something recent…

Unbidden, a memory from that very morning, in this very same office, swam into focus.

Christopher Foyle wasn't a handsome man, by any stretch of the imagination, presumably not in his youth and certainly not now. Nor had age bestowed on him a distinguished air. But there was still something unforgettable about him, almost as if the very ordinariness of his appearance rendered all the more remarkable his deliberate speech and forceful pursuit of his objective.

Fred was sure it had made him a frighteningly efficient police officer. And it would probably have made him a remarkably successful spy, come to think of it.

Yet he had looked like neither, when he strode into Deacon's office with a gleam of purpose once again firmly in his eye. Fred could tell at a glance that this time was different, that more than instinct and certainty of conviction had led him to retread these same tired steps this time.

And inexplicably, he felt himself hoping, for the first time, that perhaps they truly had been wrong, that there truly was more to this story than first appeared.

Nothing could have prepared him for the story Mr. Foyle was about to relay however.

Fred will admit it, he had stared. His mouth may have even fallen open the slightest amount, "You have proof of this?" Foyle nodded promptly, his jaw carefully set.

"Yes, I do. James Devereaux is most definitely an innocent man," his jaw worked, and Fred was suddenly struck with how much control there seemed to be behind that slight movement. He wondered, not for the first time, what this man's stake truly was in all this. "Charles Devereaux, on the other hand," a moment's hesitation, a wealth of meaning behind a slanted head tilt, "Well, that's another matter all together."

Deacon blinked at the lack of _Sir_ attached to the name, then blinked again at the study in control unfolding before him, as Foyle set his jaw and tipped his chin down once, and only once. Decisive, sure. And oddly deadly. Fred felt a prickle of cold work its way down his spine.

This was not a man he would wish to cross. For a moment, he felt an odd swell of pity for the elder Devereaux, even knowing with abject certainty that whatever the man had done, must certainly be of no small amount of criminality, to earn this level of enmity, of loathing, from a man like Christopher Foyle.

One did not have to know the man well to realize that a sterling sense of justice was as fundamental to his very nature as a keen eye and deliberate economy of speech.

Yet, in that moment more than ever, there was something in Foyle's manner that almost gave Deacon the courage to ask, "What is your interest in James Devereaux?" one more time. And this time, to demand an honest answer.

But he didn't, because Mr. Foyle was right. Their interest, as his legal counsel and defense team, in Jack's plight should have been the same as his. More than, even.

In fact, he didn't say anything. Even looking Christopher Foyle in the eye had taken a herculean effort that morning. Just as looking Jack in the eye now took an even greater amount of will power.

It was hard to look a man in the eye when you'd narrowly escaped allowing him to go to the gallows, unsung and undefended, for a crime he in no way, shape, or form was ever in danger of having actually committed.

Just as it had been hard to look this boy's rescuer in the eye, and somehow, feel as if you had almost sentenced his very son to be hanged.

00

They were walking in companionable silence towards Deacon's car, his driver obligingly reading a newspaper while he waited, well accustomed to the firm's eccentricities of time and movement.

Deacon suspected that Topper's drunken weekend escapades had inured the lot of them against such oddities more than the war had. Although to be fair Gladys' adventure with the injured badger last year remained the bar by which strange goings on were measured in this establishment.

The pleasant familiarity of such thoughts perhaps lulled him into inattention, for the question had slipped out before he could stop it, "Are we taking you to White Friars?"

Fred practically swallowed his own tongue at the full body flinch that ripped through Jack at the suggestion. Mr. Foyle's words from that morning roared back into his brain moments too late, "Quite apart from the absurdity of deer goring someone to death with their antlers in Sussex of all places, and the level of bribes and cover ups involved in making such a story feasible, never mind believable, unfortunately for _Sir_ _Charles_ , James saw the whole thing. And he can testify to that effect." The words had been as stayed as they were rushed, as terrible as they were matter of fact.

A resigned exasperation settled across Deacon's expression, more at his own inattentive cluelessness than any external person, and he stepped back carefully, giving Jack his space.

He suspected Mr. Foyle had rage and Charles Devereaux more than covered in direct connection with one another. Murder was tragic, a murder gotten away with for more than twenty years even more so. But then, so were bombs that only left monkey puzzle saplings alive in their wake.

For his part, Jack found himself swallowing only with great difficulty. It wasn't that he didn't want to believe this man was sincere in his overtures of friendship, that he didn't wish, more than he had in years, to just stop for a moment, to just rest. To just trust, even for a little while. To believe with unequivocal certainty that not everyone in the world was in the pocket of Sir Charles Devereaux.

But Jack lost his blind faith in the goodness of humanity at eight years old, and not even Christopher Foyle would ever quite be able to give it back to him.

There are some wounds that simply cannot be healed.

Fred sighed quietly, his good eye meeting Jack's unflinchingly wary gaze squarely, and all too keenly. "Is there at least somewhere we can drive you?"

The man hesitated for a moment, his eyes at once uncertain and yet determined. "Yes…there is somewhere."

Deacon nodded, "Alright, do you have an address?"

And inexplicably, that is what finally, finally drew a true laugh from Jack Devereaux.

00

Jack gazed up at the house from the welcoming shade of the trees lining the opposite side of the street. Late summer heat leeched from the paving stones, shimmering mirages evident here and there among the cracked asphalt.

He had never been there before, never even passed by the street on a random holiday home from school as a lad. But the number on the door seemed to call to him as if through time, scores and scores of scratching on paper filtering back to his ears, whether hastily scribbled in stubby pencil in his rain battered notebook or painstakingly scrawled in cursive by candle light.

Agnes hadn't hesitated, from that first letter on. He hadn't even had to ask, when it first became a possibility that they would end like this, dashed off letters saying the things they needed to say for their country, but never the things he wanted to say for themselves, finding their way across warzones and national borders. The letters always found her, as if an invisible hand guided them. Agnes wrote that to him once, in the beginning, before they feared anyone reading it but over eager British censors.

It used to give Jack an immense sense of comfort to think of that. To pray that that remained true, even long years of captivity later.

It used to. Until it spelled an end they never foresaw. Or at least, an ending he never foresaw.

 _It's a tragedy you haven't been able to see the consequences. And I think it's time you stopped_.

Jack set his jaw against the quiver of his mouth, leaving the protection of the elm's shade to walk purposefully across the street.

A cheerful line of elegantly pruned rosebushes guided his way to the door.

He raised his hand, hesitating for a moment over the knocker.

 _Mrs. Ramsay, you wouldn't happen to have seen a dangerous adventurer by the name of Jack Harkoway now would you?_

Jack let his hand fall against the door, his knuckles wrapping gently against the sun warmed wood.

He closed his eyes on the sound of familiar steps echoing beyond the threshold.

 _An address that would be very familiar to you._

Very familiar to him indeed.

00

 _I wished to express my sincere gratitude once again for the inestimable service you have rendered to me. Mr. Deacon was most prompt in extracting me from my cell. In regards to our conversation when last we met, I find myself with many questions left unanswered._ _Perhaps we might discuss these matters further at a later date._ _I would very much like to get to know you better. I hope when next we meet, it will be under more auspicious circumstances. Until such time,_ _Please know that it was my great honour to have the privilege of making your acquaintance, Sir._

 _I think my mother would have_

 _Faithfully yours_

 _Sincerely yours_

 _Sincerely, Jack_ _Devereaux_

Jack hesitated at the door of the car, his hand holding the frame hard enough to turn his knuckles white. He weighed his options for a moment, the crumpled paper in his pocket seeming to burn a hole through the fabric with its weight.

When his eyes snapped to Fred's, the man seemed to almost sit to attention in response to the purpose he saw reflected back at him. "Fred…I don't suppose you'd have an address where I could reach Mr. Foyle, would you?"


	3. A hand unlooked for

It had been a very long time since she had laid eyes on Lady Devereaux's son.

She had never quite managed to bring herself to think of him as anything else, even in the long, stilted years after her ladyship's death, as he grew from a silent boy into a withdrawn adolescent.

Even when he departed for Eton, and apart from official portraits sent home from school and then the army, to be placed in advantageous but discrete positions where they would show to best advantage, and dusted by her alone, somehow managed to simply never return.

Even when she opened the paper over breakfast one morning, and narrowly avoided spilling the marmalade across it in a most unseemly fashion.

 _He was never like that_.

From the moment of his birth, to the moment of her retirement, to this moment now, a haunted young man in an ill-fitting sweater standing uncertain yet unbent upon her stoop, she could never bring herself to think of him as anything but Lady Devereaux's son.

 _I did know a Jack…but that was a long time ago._

The figure regarded her for a moment, eyes assessing and knowing in a way they never used to be. In a way they never used to have to be.

"Mrs. Ramsey," a hesitation, so slight and so subtle, her ears strained to catch it, "may I come in…I need to speak to you about Agnes Littleton." Brown eyes, as like his mother's as they always were, and as large and unblinking as they'd been at her funeral twenty odd years ago, lowered to regard her well-washed top step.

Another hesitation, this time longer, and the voice, when it came, noticeably smaller, noticeably more hesitant, "…and about Sir Charles." And then, in a sudden gust of breath, "…and about my mother." No hesitation, no stutter, no glance away. Only dark hazel eyes, as alive and sharp and clear as they had been all those years ago, a school cap on his head, a suitcase clutched in one hand. _I shall miss you Mrs. R._

A subtle movement that might have been the beginning of a hastily snatched embrace, so uncharacteristic and yet so necessary, before it was aborted by His Lordship's heavy footsteps bearing down upon them. She had retired within the year, once three school holidays had passed, and it became clear that young Master James would not be returning.

 _Perhaps not so very long ago after all._

Judith Ramsey had never been an indecisive sort of person, in any of her dealings with her fellow men. And this was no time to change her ways. In fact, nothing had ever seemed more perfect, or inevitable, than what she was about to do, "You had better come in then…Master Jack." She almost bit her tongue at her own forwardness, her own presumption. Almost.

Because the smile, weak and mournful but somehow achingly bright despite it all, well, that was all the answer she would ever need as to whether her gamble had paid off.

And with that, she opened the door wider still, and ushered a Jack back into her acquaintance.

00

"She didn't speak of you often." Jack turned slightly, fingers tightening momentarily on the frame he'd reached out to touch the edge of. Mrs. Ramsey stood in the doorway to her sitting room, bearing an impeccably turned out tea tray.

His old instructor would be having ten cat fits by now, at the rate people kept sneaking up on his "best pupil I've ever trained, for damn sure." Jack fished around in his head for the man's name yet again. And yet again, came up empty.

He had lost many things in Dresden. Jack had long since resigned himself to that. The trouble was though, he wasn't at all sure if this should be one of the things he regretted losing, or not.

There was a faint clink of china as Mrs. Ramsey placed the tray with practiced care on the spotless side table. "Not that we spoke of such things often, in any case. We weren't on those sort of terms, naturally." Jack allowed himself a faint grin. _Still as proper as ever Mrs. R._

The words hovered on his tongue, time and distance holding them back. His hostess' eyes found the picture he still held, tracing the face smiling broadly out at the world, the girl's expression forever frozen on the edge of a laugh.

Jack remembered taking that picture, one morning on the quad at Oxford, Agnes sneaking down on the train for a visit. She had just taken the job with Sir Charles, he himself had just joined up, and there was a feeling of illicitness in the air, of stolen moments and dangers barely conceived of.

Oh, it was all terribly above board and everything, the most scandalous thing they got up to being Jack sneaking her into the junior common room for a stolen glass of cherry wine.

Jack remembers the taste of it on his lips, Agnes alive with stories of the history of Hastings, of the Devereauxs, dread curdling into Jack's stomach, dread that he was a war and a lifetime of repressed memories off being able to put a name to at the time, dread at the prospect of his girl working for his father.

His father. Jack swallowed hard, carefully replacing the frame before it cracked.

He watched Mrs. Ramsey set about pouring out the tea, familiarity slamming into him yet again. It was strange, being with her again.

 _Now mind you don't spill it Master Jack. Blow on it first!_ Jack swallowed even harder, the memory floating through his mind, fragile as gossamer. It seemed so very long ago, those days.

The happiness. The innocence. The sound of his mother's voice. _There you are Jack!_

Elegant china was extended towards him, and Jack accepted it with a twisted parody of a smile. The pattern was very familiar. _We're taking tea Mummy!_

Jack watched the liquid slosh back and forth in the cup, his hand trembling faintly in time with the thumping of his heart. "Thank you." Mrs. Ramsey cast a careful smile his way, her gaze fixed on something over his shoulder, something he hadn't quite managed to bring himself to acknowledge earlier. When she replied, her voice was as heavy with memory as his own, "You're welcome, Master Jack."

And behind them, smiling with eyes deeper and more shadowed than any person her age should ever bear, Caroline Devereaux sat watching them, a picture as frozen in time as her memory was, unmoving and eternal and never to be forgotten.

00

Jack wishes he could say Mrs. Ramsey watched him grow up. He wishes he could say he and Agnes had known her together, not separately, that she had been their confidant, their port in the storm of the war years.

But hesitating on her upper floor landing, Mrs. Ramsey poised in the half-open door before him, he was forced to admit that none of that was true.

That none of it was ever likely to have been true. Because Jack ceased to be a boy who had yet to grow up the moment he entered the Hide that last time.

Because Agnes found her way here on her own, to this haven of quiet safety and impeccably kept china, Jack thousands of miles away, a prisoner of war for nearly two years already.

Because there were no true ports of safety to be found in that war, not during it, and not after.

"She spoke of you." The words stuck in his throat some, emerging thick and croaked, but Mrs. Ramsey's eyes held only understanding, free of any detectable tinge of censure.

If Jack was on a recruitment drive for the section, he would be doing splendidly by now.

He hesitated on the final step, his eyes finding the one section of floorboard with the inevitable squeak. "Not often, not in so many words, you understand, but in those last letters, towards…" He let the words trail away, let the silence speak louder than they ever could. _Towards the end_ …

Mrs. Ramsey cleared her throat, the afternoon sun slanting down from the skylight on stalwartly dry eyes. She had had a husband once, Jack remembered. And in some ways, many ways devastating, painful ways, one war was much like another.

Neither of them was a stranger to loss. But then, nobody was, these days.

"What did she say?" Jack's head jerked up, meeting the frank gaze of his hostess, the bluntness of the statement catching his breath for a moment. Distantly, he identified the emotion thrumming along his skin as relief. Pure and simple.

He was so very tired of secrets.

Jack quirked a grin, genuine and boyish in a way he thought long lost to him. "She said you made the best tea she'd ever tasted."

 _Mummy, Mummy! Come and taste Mrs. R's tea! It's the bestest ever!_

Jack swallowed around the memory, and for once, he tasted nothing but the sweetness of remembrance.

00

"Do you have a place to stay?" Jack glanced over his shoulder, eyes wide and vulnerable in their surprise. A face of honest practicality gazed back at him.

Jack slumped on the edge of the bed. Agnes' bed. The sheets had been changed, the place scrubbed from stem to stern. And it had been six years of separation and rationing. And yet, Jack could swear there was just a whiff of Agnes' scent left, about the edges of the room, subtle and memorable and untameable.

And so very, purely _Agnes._ He closed his eyes on the memories, holding the scent in his lungs and heart as long as he could, before turning back to the woman waiting patiently by the open door.

"Thanks for the concern Mrs. Ramsey, but I'll be fine." He winces before the words finish leaving his mouth. As reassurances go, it was a truly poor attempt.

But then, he'd never been able to lie to Mrs. R in any case, whether it was sneaking cookies before his tea or tracking grass across the freshly polished front hall.

If the former housekeeper's expression was anything to go by, she was not in the least fooled. Or amused. But then, he was hardly eight years old anymore. He should know better.

"Really Master Jack, you know better than that." Apparently, Mrs. R agreed, if the note of gentle reprimand in her voice was anything to go by. And she was right, he did know better. Once.

Jack swallowed. No more secrets. "Sorry," he ducked his head to regard the immaculate bedspread morosely, "It's just…I rather forgot what it was like. Having people to rely on." Although people kept reminding him, from Christopher Foyle to Fred Deacon to Mrs. Ramsey.

At this rate, he might just have to get used to having other people in his life again. It was an odd thought. But far from an unwelcome one.

Mrs. Ramsey seemed to sense his acceptance, nodding her head decisively. "Well then, I'd best leave you to get settled in. Come down when you're ready, there's washing up to help with Master Jack." The last is said over her shoulder, her feet making a rapid, near silent clicking on the upper landing.

Jack found himself unable to stifle his laughter at the instruction, his hand pressing to his aching ribs, the scent of Agnes at once comforting and choking.

Perhaps some things truly didn't change. It was a wistful thought, to be sure.

But it was not without a faint trace of hope to it as well.

00

Deacon had not had an address for Mr. Foyle, as it happened. Nor had he been entirely sure of the true nature of the man's urgent business in America.

Which had left Jack with a pocket still stuffed full of half-written letters, and a strangely hollow sensation in his chest.

But at least now he had some idea of what, or at least where, _I'll be away for a while_ , entailed.

Jack remained hunched over at the foot of Agnes' bed, his shoulders sloping as much with pain as with exhaustion or grief.

His fingers brushed the unaddressed envelope in his pocket, the events of the day crashing about his brain like the gale that had swept the channel, the morning he boarded a boat to France, the last time he say his father before-

Jack brutally wrenched his thoughts away from the recollection. His father indeed…

It will later seem to Jack that the words were shouted at top volume, bouncing around the interrogation cell like an air raid siren, wailing and wailing until it felt like the ringing would never completely fade from one's ears.

 _It wasn't an accident_.

Jack lets the tears come, lets them drip down his face and soak into his ill-fitting shirt collar. He doesn't move to brush them away, doesn't move at all beyond a slight turn of his head, his shoulders hunched and stiff, his eyes finding his companion's across the impossibly wide space of the cell table.

Christopher Foyle looks like someone ripped his heart out of his chest and left him too stunned to even gasp for breath or cry out in pain. Jack knows that expression well. He suspects he's looked like that since the first blow of Sir Charles' cane impacted his mother's skull.

He used to think that expression was uniquely his. Jack lets the thought slip away, too caught up in the memories to focus on the moment.

Mr. Foyle's eyes hold on his for a long moment, neither of them so much as blinking. In the next instant, the man's eyes will close in an immeasurable display of quiet grief and resigned regret. In the next instant, Jack will blink too hard to clear the tears from his eyes, will force himself to say the words he never thought he'd find the strength to say, let alone the opportunity.

In the next moment, his eyes will slide away into the unfocused distance of remembrance. In the next moment, Mr. Foyle will look away. In the next moment, the spell will be broken.

But for that moment, that longest of moments, Jack looks into a pair of eyes so unlike his own, and yet so very, very similar, gazes through the tears and the pain and the memories and the regrets, and finds…

He isn't sure actually, of what he finds. A shared grief, a shared love, more understanding and acceptance in a single glance than his own father has ever given him in a lifetime worth of glances.

A shared remembrance, of a woman who meant more than either of them could ever quite express, to both of them.

An ending, a resolution, a confession, a benediction. A release, a surrender.

 _For the sake of the child._

 _What had he found_. Jack brought his hands away from his face, the palms wet with tears, his eyes finding a picture on Agnes' side table. The little boy in the photo grins back at him, seemingly oblivious to the painful clench of a disapproving Charles Devereaux's hand on his shoulder, his own hand raised in an enthusiastic wave at the lens.

At the person behind the camera.

Jack remembers his mother taking that picture, the photographer regarding her with affronted astonishment, his father a seething mass of rage and indignation, restrained only by the illusion of lordly manners and saving face in front of his lessers.

He remembers her hand raising in an answering wave, her face hidden behind the thick black cape, he remembers her catching him up in an embrace afterwards.

Jack slips the picture from the frame quietly, turning it over and catching a sob behind his fingers at the inscription, the lettering as beautiful as he remembers it being then.

 _Happy birthday my darling boy, my Jack!_

It had been his eighth.

Jack slides down the side of the bed, the picture clutched to his chest, his teeth clenched hard enough to ache on the sobs ripping across his cracked ribcage. He remembers giving Agnes the picture. _To remember me by_.

He remembers her laugh, tinged with great emotion, eyes understanding and honoured and sad. She was there when the picture was taken after all. She knew what it meant to him.

And what giving it to her meant for them. She had placed a hand against his uniform overcoat, the chill of the water blanketing the dock in early morning fog. And she had kissed his cheek, tossed her head in a cheeky grin, and folded her hands over the frame, over her heart. "You come back to me now, Jack Harkoway."

There are things he lost in Dresden that he will forever regret. There are things he lost after Dresden that he will forever miss.

A quiet knock at the door. "Master Jack," a hesitation. Mrs. R really would make a fantastic addition to the Section. "…supper's on the table, best come down while it's still hot."

Jack swiped ineffectually at his face, the picture resting against his bent chest, uncreased and whole.

He reached with steady fingers, and with deliberate carefulness, tore Sir Charles cleanly from the picture, discarding the fragment.

Tucking the other half, inscription undamaged into his pocket, Jack rolled to his feet and headed for the wash basin. "Just be a moment Mrs. R."

Behind him, the fragment bearing Sir Charles landed face down in a corner, amongst a nest of escaped dust swirls, already forgotten.

00

Mrs. Ramsey was the sort of person who smiled often. Jack remembers that.

Of the things he lost after Dresden, the memories that never quite returned, or came back as shadowed copies of their former selves, with holes and gaps and pieces missing from the edges, the happy years of his early childhood featured with a distressing amount of regularity.

Oh, not broad grins, which would have been quite out of character for the model of efficiency and decorum that was the Devereauxs' former housekeeper. Not laughter or obvious outbursts of emotion, but a quiet, unreserved sort of affection that young Jack Devereaux had basked in with the same easy acceptance he felt towards the knowledge that his mother had always loved him, and would always be there to love him.

He thought he was done breaking the hearts of the people who cared about him.

Judging from the look on Mrs. Ramsey's face, however, that was far from being the case.

"His lordship kill-" she cut off the words before they were fully formed, face drawn and white. Jack remained crouched over the saucer shards strewn across the kitchen floor. In retrospect, observing his new honesty-is-best policy in response to Mrs. Ramsey's no doubt innocuously intended, "Have you seen his lordship yet?" could perhaps have waited until the washing up was complete.

On the other hand, Mrs. Ramsey had been at the dock when he had boarded for France, coming down on her day off to tuck a sandwich wrapped in brown paper into his coat pocket, roast beef and cheese, his favourite, and give him a brisk pat on the shoulder, accompanied by a matter-of-fact, "Now, just you be careful over there Master Jack."

So perhaps they both could have picked a better time to bring up the elephant in the room that always had been, and probably always would be, the ominous presence of Sir Charles in their lives.

Jack carefully set down a jagged piece of china on the counter, and offered his mother's house keeper a tight nod of confirmation. He couldn't make himself say the words again. Not here. Not now. It would do no one any good, in any case.

He lowered his eyes to the floor as the blood drained further from her face, if that were even possible. "I'm sorr-"

Mrs. Ramsey cut him off abruptly, her voice tight with pain, "No! Never apologize for that which is not your fault Master Jack, especially not this-" And just like that, her expression crumbled once more, a few tears slipping down her cheeks.

Jack had never felt more useless, more unsure. Not in a long, long time. Not since-

Mrs. Ramsey blotted her face on her apron, her eyes liquid but her chin firm. Another tear slipped down her cheek, unremarked on by either of them. A very, very good spy indeed.

"Well, it's not as if I'm greatly surprised. I always suspected that there was more to it than-" She stopped herself once more. Dry eyed, if not exactly fully recovered, she turned back to Jack, just the edge of a sharpness to her question, "Sir Charles is not still at liberty, I suppose?"

Jack gave Mrs. Ramsey a haunted smile, eyes hooded but tone just a touch satisfied, "Mr. Foyle arrested him."

It was all Jack had to offer as paltry comfort to a truth more terrible than anything she could ever have suspected, even in the darkest recesses of her heart.

But somehow, oddly, in that moment, it was a true comfort indeed. Mrs. Ramsey nodded, "They caught him then. Good." And with that, she went to get a broom.

00

"What was Mr. Foyle's interest then?"

 _What had he found._

Jack considered the cup of cocoa in his hand, blowing out a breath under the guise of cooling the piping hot liquid. They had abandoned the dishes as a lost cause for the moment, his hostess' hands as steady as her face was drawn as she gave a decisive nod over the swept up remains of her second-best china teacup. "Cocoa, I think."

Judging by Mrs. Ramsey's polite contemplation of her own mug, she wasn't fooled in the least. But just as she had with his mother all those years ago, her face tinged green and purple even under the experienced application of makeup, she allowed him the needed time to collect himself.

A gaze that seemed to last forever, a single moment stretching across time and space. A handkerchief produced without ceremony, offered with quiet kindness and soft understanding.

A hunched figure, leaning over him just far enough to block the guard's view of his face, but just shallowly enough to not become intimidating in the process.

A hand ghosting along his shoulder, asking permission rather than demanding or seeking or assuming. A hand cupping the side of his cheek, a thumb brushing away a single tear, a gesture so quick he almost missed it himself.

That same hand, flipped over and offered to him as the cell door clanged open. "Everything all right Sir?" A gaze, inquiring and worried and gentle, for Jack's eyes alone, never wavering, never faltering. A lifeline in a storm, a light in a fog.

Sir Charles' eyes finding him through a throng of soldiers, the closest the man every came to deigning to say goodbye to him as he went off to war.

Jack's fingers curling around Christopher Foyle's, tightening until his knuckles turned white, giving him the strength to get to his feet, to offer the man the edges of a genuine smile, to say, "Everything's fine now, thank you." And to somehow, know that one day, he might even mean it.

 _What had he found_. Jack met Mrs. Ramsey's eyes over the mug, steam curling gently towards the kitchen's low ceiling.

His eyes turned warm and soft, and for a moment, it seemed to Mrs. Ramsey as if she was looking into the face of another person she had loved, a lifetime ago.

"He knew my mother." And as if that explained everything, Jack sipped his cocoa, gracing her with a brilliant smile, "That's lovely Mrs. R, thank you."

Mrs. Ramsey thought about a face lined with wisdom and experience, eyes closed on an expression of infinite sadness. Perhaps it did explain everything at that.

 _But the name did seem to mean something to you._

She watched the lad drink his cocoa, this lad who was so very like his mother. So very unlike Sir Charles. But perhaps, not so very unlike his father.

But then, such things were none of her business. Still, she smiled her gratitude for the oft repeated compliment of old, and allowed herself the indulgence of uttering the words no one had yet had the chance to say. The words that Caroline Devereaux and Agnes Littleton where not here to say.

"Welcome home Jack."

Jack swallowed around the chocolate coating his throat, thick and hot and comforting, and let the words curl into his chest and wash away just a touch of the pain that forever lurked there.

 _What had he found_. He thought about blue eyes, unblinking and uncompromising and unapologetic.

Eyes that offered understanding, that offered trust and compassion and opportunity.

And perhaps, even, a new beginning.


	4. Whispers in the Trees

The peacocks were still calling.

Jack tightened his fingers on the door of the taxi, the metal cold and unyielding under his grip.

Those calls were one of his earliest memories, inspiring an interest in birds that started almost before he could talk.

He remembers standing in the field behind the long barn, his field glasses crushed between small fingers, one of the birds cocking an inquiring head at him from mere feet away.

It was Lady Grey. That's what his mother had named the matriarch of the little flock that had staked a permanent claim to the Devereaux estate.

Jack stood there a long time, his small body shaking with repressed emotion, tears dripping silently down his face.

He had wanted to throw those field glasses so badly. Every noise those birds made, every second since his mother's death, it was all he could do not to _scream_.

"Coo-ee?" Lady Grey pecked inquiringly at Jack's laces. He raised his foot, as if to kick-

 _Damn pests those birds. I have half a mind to tell Simms to take his rook rifle to them-_

Jack remembers the wet coolness of the grass on his face, as he curled around his field glasses, his fingers tearing at bits of long grass, his small body hiccupping and jumping with each sob.

He remembers waking up cold and stiff, dusk beginning to fall. He remembers his father's, _Sir Charles'_ shouts sending his heart thudding into his throat, _Where are you, useless boy!?_

And he remembers sitting up slowly, his eyes adjusting to the fading light, his little face scrunching up in wonder for the first time since he stopped going to the Hide.

For around him, like an honour guard of vibrantly clothed silent watchers, was dozens and dozens of peacocks. More than he'd ever seen before in his life.

And there, stationed protectively at his shoulder, was Lady Grey.

Jack raised his head towards the house, towards the shouts, only to find his vision obscured by peacocks. And because he's eight, and so very alone, he throws his arms around Lady Grey, trembling _thank yous_ into her feathers. Her beak threads through his hair, and for just a moment, he can imagine it's his mother's fingers, warm and soft and _alive_.

Jack leaves the birds there, dashing away from them before the shouts can get any closer.

He never goes near any of the birds on the Estate after that, be they peacocks or otherwise. He never so much as looks at his field glasses, forgetting them somewhere and burying where so deep in his mind, he couldn't remember if he wanted to.

He never so much as looks up at the sky, even on the brightest days.

But the following shooting season, Simms is all demurring and murmuring about the neighboring Estate's new collection of peacocks and, _Our birds be the oldest in the whole county, Your Lordship, much bett'n that new stock over on Lord Tillbury's lands._

And twenty years later, the peacocks are still calling.

00

Jack swallowed against the perpetual hollowness in his chest, forcing his legs to move beyond the car, tipping the driver heavily in response to his genuinely concerned, "You alright there, lad?"

"Fine, thank you." The cabbie shoots him an incredulous look as he drives away, and Jack casts a rueful look down at his person. Mrs. Ramsey's cooking had truly done wonders on the protrusion of his ribs against his paper white skin, but he still looked exactly like what he was; a freshly released prisoner of war.

Whose war, he was still not quite sure.

"James…?" Jack jerked his head up. Paisley dress, crimped yellow hair, drawn expression. In many ways, his stepmother appeared unchanged by the ravages of the past half-decade.

Then she drew near, and Jack recognized the familiar rounded shoulders and haunted eyes, the same rounded shoulders and haunted eyes that looked back at him every time he happened to spy himself in the glass in Agnes' room.

He tried hard to avoid such happenings.

"Jane…" They had never been close. She had tried, oh how this woman before him had tried, despite Sir Charles ever present scowls of disapproval and words of censure.

But James had learned his lesson with the peacocks, and learned it well. After Simon, after his mother, he would never again risk bringing down the wrath of his father on anyone or anything.

He stopped speaking to Jane altogether the Hols of his fifteenth birthday.

At least that way, the only fresh bruises at the breakfast table were guaranteed to be his.

The gravel crunched loudly in the awkward pause forming between stepmother and stepson.

Just as she had always done, Jane reached across the gap first, "James…how are you?" The words were writhing with emotion, pain and regret and anger. Jack could sympathize.

He scuffed a shoe across the drive, watching the stones skip this way and that, waiting just long enough to get his heart to fall back down his throat, to reassure his instincts what his head already knew. _Sir Charles wasn't here._

 _He couldn't hurt him any more. Couldn't hurt_ them _any more._

Jack looked up, and for perhaps the first time in both their lives, met his stepmother's gaze.

"I'm alive," He shrugged helplessly, something in his chest giving at the look of pure understanding reflected back in Jane's eyes. And then, prompted by the clear crispness of Fall, Sir Charles free air, he squared his shoulders out of their habitual slump and thrust a hand forward, bridging the gap between them, "and it's Jack now."

His stepmother stared at him for a moment, before a smile somewhere between a laugh and a sob graced her countenance, and she clasped his proffered hand in both of hers. "It's _wonderful_ to meet you Jack, and it's Jane-Anne, actually, properly. Charles never approved-well…" her words stumbled to a halt, and Jack finally gave into the inevitable, drawing his stepmother into a gentle embrace.

Her arms clasped him a little too tightly, his own a little too awkward, their eyes both oddly dry.

But for the first time since he said goodbye to Agnes and shipped out to France in '39, Jack allowed himself to embrace another human being.

And allowed himself to hope, to pray, to believe that this time, he wouldn't get them killed.

00

The hall echoed oddly under his borrowed shoes. Fred Deacon had very graciously loaned him his spare pair, since the pair from the prison were rubbing his ankles raw and bloody. Fred had had some…interesting things to say about that particular aspect of his incarceration.

Jack had listened with bemusement, and carefully _not_ mentioned his doubtlessly broken ribs.

Jane- _Anne_ 's hand brushed his arm gently, a new and fragile intimacy existing between them.

The intimacy born of loss, Jack supposed. Or perhaps the refusal to lose anything more.

"I'll make us some tea, shall I?" Jack's eyes were fixed back on the front door. He remembers the sound of it slamming, when Charles threw him out of the house for joining up before, _the thick of the fighting started. How are you going to bring honour to our family name if there's nothing heroic going on? Stupid boy!_

His stepmother followed his gaze, and hesitated for a moment, "…we could have it in Char-in _his_ study?"

The one room in the vast house where its lord and master had refused to ever permit any form of liquid, be it tea or blood.

Jack felt his lips twitch, almost against his will. For a moment, vindictive glee over road stark terror in his chest, "That sounds delightful, thank you."

They smiled at one another, and for once, not a shout was to be heard.

00

His father's study overlooked the Hide. Jack had hated that, in the earliest years of his childhood, that idyllic existence so often shattered by his father's vile temper and tyrannical ego.

Slowly making his way to the windows, Jack forced his eyes not to stray to the picture on the corner of Sir Charles' desk, to his knowledge unmoved these thirty years.

Sir Charles had always been insanely jealous of the things he viewed as his possessions.

His wife had been no exception. Even from her own son.

Jack gazed out at the sweeping lawn, towards the lake in the distance. He could just make out the shapes of a mother swan and her gaggle of signets, swimming leisurely over the tranquil surface.

 _Picturesque._ That was what Sir Charles' chronicle had said of this vista, in the fragments and single lines Agnes had slipped into her earliest letters, back when he was still just Captain James Devereaux, not yet decorated or promoted or captured.

 _Purgatory._ That was what this vista had meant to James, ever since he first read Dante's _Inferno_ behind his literature master's back, at his old prep school.

A lie. That was all Jack could think now, in this moment, the house at his back silent except for ghosts and survivors, its secrets suddenly ripped from its hallowed depths and green, green lawns.

Watching the mother swan gently shepherd an errant offspring up beneath her broad wing, Jack could not help but wonder what Mr. Foyle had made of this same view. Of its splendour and history. Of its secrets and lies.

What Mr. Foyle had made of _him_.

And perhaps most of all, what his mother had thought of it, all of this. This life she had chosen for them. This life she had been forced to choose, because of him.

Jack rested his face against the cool glass of the vaulted window, his eyes losing their focus as the swan and her brood blurred out of focus, prisms of light refracting the sun-drenched lawn in a mass of gold and green and blue.

He let his thoughts drift this way and that, but as he squeezed his eyes shut on the glaring beauty before him, Jack found himself having the strangest of thoughts.

Of what it would have been like, to grow up in a little row house on the streets of Hastings, where the sound of the sea would no doubt have lulled him to sleep each night.

To grow up with a mother and a father who looked _at_ one another, instead of right through each other. To have a father who _wasn't_ terrifying, a mother who _wasn't_ terrified.

To have a father who wiped his tears instead of splitting his lip, who fought dragons with him, instead of becoming the monster that lurked in the shadows of every unhappiness.

To have a little brother to share secrets and climb trees and hide behind curtains with.

To have a mother who could have been happy, truly happy. Who might have lived–

Jack faltered for a moment, the cool glass of the window pane pressing against the pads of his fingers until they became stiff and numb.

Distantly, in the gathering shadows of the late afternoon, a pheasant called again, a strangely mournful crow that echoed back and back, out and out, until it died away all together.

Leaving behind only shadows and silence.


	5. Bruises that Fade

The door's hinges made the same noise, somewhere unfortunately placed between a wheeze and a creak.

Jack had refused to allow anyone in here after his mother's death, shoving his dresser, books, toys, even his bed on one memorable occasion against the old oak door, in a vain attempt to shut out the world.

Which, for young James Deveraux, whether eight or eighteen, had meant one thing: Sir Charles.

All in vain, because if there was one thing Sir Charles had always excelled at, even more than his unanimously acknowledged as brilliant by all who knew or taught him son, it was _patience_.

Jack trailed his finger through a bank of dust crowning his old dresser. He breathed in the mustiness until his lungs clogged, until he had an excuse for why his throat needed to be cleared.

An excuse other than tears.

00

Tea in Sir Charles' study had been as deliciously subversive as they had both hoped. For the first two minutes. After that, it had become steadily more depressing, more oppressive with every tick of the clock in the hall.

His father used to make him stand in the doorway, his eyes fixed on that clock, every time he was as much as a second late for any meal. Gazing at the doorway, the echoes of hunger pains shooting through his stomach, the half a tea cake he's managed curdles sourly in his throat.

Jane-Anne glanced from the doorway to Jack and back, and the darkening of her eyes, the tightening of her mouth, makes Jack wonder what she's heard, what she's guessed.

Or what she's experienced. By fourteen, he had long since ceased coming to meals all together, the rare occasions he was in the house at all.

Jane-Anne placed her cup down with a decided click, deliberately sloshing tea over some of Sir Charles' papers. "Why don't we raid the pantry?"

One of the few activities they had ever engaged in, Sir Charles being many things, but a light sleeper mercifully not being one of them.

Jack set his own cup down with infinite more care, _don't spill anything boy!_

But he touched it down on the hardwood of the desk that was almost as precious to his father as this house, and deliberately forgot to reach for a saucer from the tea tray.

"Why not." And if Jane-Anne's eyes were as haunted as the Jane of his memory's were, then her smile was also as sweet and gentle and open as it had been then.

00

By the time he returned upstairs, Jack has almost forgotten Sir Charles, his belly fully of tea cakes and jam sandwiches, nibbling on the edge of a purloined blueberry scone.

Then a crumb falls from the sweet, brushing his fingers maddeningly, even as he reached vainly to catch it, stumbling in the doorway.

For a moment, Jack's heart thudding in his ears was the only sound he could hear, waiting for the shouts, the fists, the bruises.

In the distance, the hall clock chimed. _Late again boy!_

Jack stuffed the rest of the scone into his mouth whole, choking on the crumbs, angry at his own terror of something that could no longer hurt him.

 _Someone_ that _would_ no longer be able to hurt _anyone._ Not if he had anything to say about it.

Shoving the memories away, slamming them to the furthest depths of his mind and barring the door, Jack swept the dust from his old desk with the arm of his borrowed jacket.

He doubts the person who used it previously is still around to mind. Swallowing the horridness of that thought, he resolutely flipped open an old school notebook, Chemistry by the look of it.

He flipped to a clean page, and hesitated for a long moment, considering.

 _Caroline Deveraux_

 _Simon Ro-_

A trickle of piano keys came to his ears for a moment. Schubert. It had been one of Simon's favourites. Jack squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head as if to rid his ears of the sound. Two decades of forgetting things he prayed he never would, and now, all he seemed to be able to do was remember things he never wanted to.

Things that were of no help to anyone, anymore.

Wiping his grimy sleeve across his face, Jack stabbed the pencil down with more force than strictly necessary.

 _Simon Rothstein_

He hesitated again. Simon had mentioned a father, hadn't he? And perhaps a sister? Filing that away for later, Jack continued.

 _Jane-Anne Deveraux_

 _Judith Ramsey_

Another hesitation, the pencil tip just touching the paper.

 _Jam Jack Dev_

 _Jack_

 _Christopher Foyle_

This last was written with a flourish, decisive and bold.

 _I knew her_. He let the words echo and re-echo through his mind, savouring the sound of them, the sentiment behind them, as something untainted by the man who had ruled this house with an iron fist and a perfectly coiffed brow.

The man who had destroyed all their lives, in one way or another.

Jack carefully folded the notebook, leaning forward until his head rested on his slumped forearms. He was so very tired.

Then, even as sleep pressed at the corners of his mind, from the corner of his eye, Jack caught the glimpse of something he had not thought to see again. Not in this life, at any rate.

 _Have at you, my boy Jack_.

Maybe, just perhaps, not _all_ of the ghosts in these walls were bad ones.

00

Jack and Dick and Harry were half-way around the Cape, hot on the trail of a particularly dastardly gang of pirates, when the knock sounded at the door.

For a moment, Jack's heart leaps into his throat, his hand shoving the creased pages out of sight, violent, desperate, cursing himself for his stupidity of leaving the door open…

Reality reasserts itself as he's crouched beside the bed, Jack Harkaway safely out of sight beneath his mattress. In all his searches of Jack's room, Sir Charles had never thought to look there, somehow.

The man would have made a terrible spy. The thought made Jack's lips twitch as much at twenty-eight as it had made James' twitch at eight.

He met Jane-Anne's gaze, schooling his terror away in a sweep of sheepish shrugging.

For a moment, her eyes look so very, very old, and so very, very tired.

Then the look is gone, morphing into a forced, upbeat smile.

Jack is reminded terribly, horribly of his own mother. "We have a visitor."

And all the forced smiles in the world can't trick either of them into believing it's good news.

00

There's a lawyer in the front hall. Jack suspects this is rarely ever a cause for celebration, even among those blessed with more ordinary lives than his as so far proved to be.

Ordinarily, he would disagree, on account of _who_ the lawyer in question happened to be, if not on general principle. But then, these were hardly ordinary circumstances.

"Mr. Deacon," despite the obvious urgency of his news, Deacon took the time to level Jack with a reprimanding glance. His reward was a quirked half-smile, and a softly corrected, "—Fred… What's going on?"

Deacon drew his cane across the ground for a moment, both of their eyes tracing the scraping, scratching sounds it echoed through the vast entry. "Look, there's no easy way to say this," Deacon straightened his shoulders abruptly, his good eye fixing on Jack, "It appears that there's a strong possibility that he may be acquitted. Charles Devereaux." Jack swallowed down a hollow laugh, as if such clarification was necessary, particularly here, in these walls.

Jack shoved his hands into his pockets, fisting them to quiet as much of their sudden trembling as possible, "How much of a possibility?" He tried to keep his face neutral, he truly did.

If Fred's slight jaw clench was anything to judge at, he hadn't _quite_ succeeded there, "Almost certainly." A stronger jaw clench, "Friends-"

"-in high places. Yes, I'm not surprised." Jack offered up a bitter smile to Deacon's slightly bemused expression. Tied by blood or not, Jack had spent his entire life bearing the privilege of being Sir Charles Deveraux's son. He knew how the world of men like his father worked.

Deacon's shoulders slumped, his eye downcast. "I promise you, I'll do everything I can–" Jack cut him off before he could go any further, his hand warm and firm on Fred's shoulder, his eyes wide and sincere as he'd ever seen them, "I know you will Fred. I _know_."

Fred's answering nod was tight with urgency, but firm with sincerity.

Jack dropped his hands into a clap, springing back the way he'd come abruptly, "Well then, come and meet Jane-Anne, it seems we have a battle to plan!"

If Jack Deveraux had approached the planning of actual battles with this much energy and commanding grace, Fred found himself thinking ruefully, it's little wonder he was such a ruddy good spy.

00

Later, much later, Deacon long gone, darkness fallen and Mrs. R safely telephoned to, Jack retreated to his old room, hauling the dresser across the floor, wincing at every creak and screech, until it was snugged up against the door as tightly as it will go.

Placing a candle on his bedside table, wiping away dust at random to stave off further fire hazards, he groped blindly beneath the bed covers for his earlier precious find.

The book, when his fingers finally grasp the cover and pull if forth, is bent nearly in two, the dust jacket ripped clean off the front. He used to be better at this.

And thus it is there, knees drawn up to his chest, flickering candle light mixing with a wan moon filtering through the half-drawn curtains, fingers smoothing down age and dust worn pages, that Jack finally sees the name, scrawled where the jacket used to be firmly glued down, the ink long faded but still just metallic enough to catch the light.

 _Property of Christopher Foyle._


End file.
